Comedy is a philosophical poem for the twenty-first century inspired by Dante's Commedia. It can be read as an ironic dream or fantasy that addresses the democratic idea. Book One, Archival Resurrections, explores the transindividual nature of human thought, which autonomously expands while it passes through different minds in historical time. On a walk in Seattle, the Narrator encounters his dead teacher, who becomes his guide through a world inside his own head where he encounters people from his personal past and past philosophers, poets, and statesmen, including Dante, Christine de Pizan, Spinoza, William Blake, Jefferson, Hamilton, Sally Hemings, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Marx, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and others. Part of the poem takes place in a library in the shape of an inverted cone, the antithesis of Dante's purgatory. Later, under the assumption that imagination is topological or plastic, there are visitations to Blake's cottage in Felpham, Lincoln's White House, Marx's London, and Wilde's and Joyce's Dublin. Joyce's Volta cinema is the gateway to Book Two, entitled Cinematic Revolutions, which will envision the twentieth century through its signature aesthetic form. Book Three, as yet untitled, will explore lived cityscapes as forms of life that gestate in themselves different possibilities for the future.
Industry Reviews
“Patrick McGee’s Comedy, Book One: Archival Resurrections ends with the lines ‘Then I touched the screen which seemed somehow to bend / And to my wonder opened—and I stepped in.’ This is what he asks of the reader as he leads you through his beautifully written adventures. The stanzas are an adaptation of free rhyme. McGee’s mind is as free as the creative journey into which he beckons us also: step in, and with wonder, we do.”
—Claire Braz-Valentine, poet/playwright
“Riddled with anger, raw intelligence, and the rain-wet beauty that sometimes appears at the bottom of a hill in the northwest, this Commedia is Seattle’s masterpiece. City dreaming, the curious wanderer encounters Sally Hemings and Lincoln, Oscar Wilde and Billy the Kid, Karl Marx and his old teachers, and, subtle as Dante, rekindles old loves. This is a west-coast Commedia, a wistful, forgiving, and deeply moving recasting of what has made one American.”
—Enda Duffy, Chair, English Department, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Find hope ye who enter here, on a literary walkabout—a bold exploration of the democratic ideal —where we chat with Marx, Jefferson, Spinoza and, before it’s over, both Lincoln and Dante Alighieri. McGee charms, instructs, and provokes us through a field theory of human enlightenment, one thousand-plus years of art and literature, critiquing and finally levitating this twenty-first century, accomplishing in his Comedy something beyond the reach of most. Brilliance, married to enchantment.”
—R. L. Blackwood, Member Emeritus, Writers’ Guild of America West
“McGee’s Comedy takes Dante as a model, but the first book is an inferno only insofar as fire is like flowing water, which in turn is like thought itself: mixing, altering, and consuming as it goes. Behind it is an idea that also occurs in McGee’s critical works: that the worlds we exist in are woven through streams of thought that change and flow. Among this flow are currents that express a growing understanding of how things might be.”
—Anthony Uhlmann, literary critic and novelist
